Review by T. Adlam

Installation on my desktop running Windows 7 went very smoothly (took about 15 minutes from start to finish) and I found the software to be surprisingly snappy when processing videos.

But I need to back up a moment and mention that although I spend a great deal of time working on graphics, I’m new to video editing (aside from some tutorial and review videos I did using TechSmith’s Camtasia) and this software has a serious learning curve. I would actually recommend the first thing a new user do is download the documentation (which is surprisingly thorough and actually helpful) from the Corel website and read it. But be warned, it’s massive.

Moving along, I’ve mainly been using this software to create relatively short movies (longest being about 15 minutes) geared toward teaching/reviewing and have found them to compile/render quickly (less than 30 minutes apiece). And the software sports and amazing number of features, but I’m absolutely in love with its subtitle feature. It’s a little scary how easy they are to add and the software detects where the sound clips are so you don’t need to manually queue up the subtitles to speech–that was an absolute joy for me. Overall I enjoy using this software and find myself opening it far more than Casmtasia when I need to edit a video.

Now I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that privacy junkies should be certain to completely read the licensing agreement because it grants Corel the right to collect certain data (along with potentially personally identifiable information) through use of the software. And it also states that the software can only be installed on a single machine and in the event you need to install it on another machine should your hard disk fail (it seems that’s the only scenario in which you’d be allowed to reinstall the software on another computer) you must call Corel’s customer service for permission to do so…this could cramp the style of a multi-computer household, and at least Apple gives you the ability to deregister a computer via its website.